Monitoring Biden and other Contemporary Events

Again, you really look stupid when you spew nothingness and try to pass it as fact.

TERM LIMITS.

The longer a ‘representative’ is in Washington, the more deals they make with lobbyists and other people peddling money for favors. They’re all multimillionaires because they decided to enrich themselves by selling out their constituents.

TERM LIMITS.

TERM LIMITS.

Quote:

TERM LIMITS.

Let people vote for whomever they wish as long as they want. Instead, concentrate on campaign finance reform, banning revolving door lobbyists, overturning "Citizens United", repealing corporate personhood, and pursuing other structural reforms to the actual system rather than regulating the duration of personalities in office.

It might seem late in the game to point to any one event as a final or conclusive moment in the decline of the Republican Party. And I have no doubt that if the GOP returns to power this winter, its worst members will find new ways to appall decent people while gamboling about in jester’s bells for its base. (As my Atlantic colleague Adam Serwer has put it so well, “The cruelty is the point.”) But the reaction among Republican elected officials and their conservative-media life-support system to the beating of Paul Pelosi—by a man named David DePape, who was charged with attempting to kidnap Speaker Nancy Pelosi and admitted to planning to torture her—feels different.

I am not alone; my friend Mona Charen, among others, also senses that this event marks a new level of depravity in the GOP. I have struggled for a few days to decide why, exactly, this moment seems like an inflection point. In terms of actual damage, January 6 was far worse than one violent crime in San Francisco. Republican leaders—and here I will leave aside Donald Trump, who is in a class of hideousness all by himself—have said far worse things over the past five years. But a parade of Republicans somehow think that an unhinged, hammer-wielding intruder putting an old man in the ICU is funny.

We might expect such inanity from pathetic attention hounds such as Donald Trump Jr. and the usual conservative troll-pundits. Some of them tried to get a rumor about Paul Pelosi trending and briefly succeeded, especially when Twitter’s new boss, Elon Musk, characteristically decided that he just had to get involved in something he knows nothing about and amplified a dodgy story about it on Twitter. (He later deleted the tweet.) GOP leaders, however, stayed silent.

But that didn’t stop people in both right-wing politics and media from laughing it up over the Pelosi attack, including the Arizona gubernatorial contender Kari Lake, Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin, and sitting Representative Clay Higgins. Others have joined in trying to obfuscate or deflect attention from the intent of the attack; Senator John Cornyn of Texas even lamely tried to raise immigration as an issue. (DePape is here on a long-expired visa from Canada.)

One might think that it would be easy for America, as one nation, to condemn an attempt to kidnap the woman second in line to the presidency that resulted in the beating of her husband with a hammer. As Ernest Hemingway would say: Pretty to think so. Instead, we have seen the dark heart of the Republican Party, with a reaction so callous, so flippantly sadistic, so hateful, that it all feels irredeemable.

Of course, Republicans have put on a master class in whataboutism over the past few days. What about the people who laughed at Rand Paul’s neighbor giving the Kentucky senator a beatdown? What about Kathy Griffin’s ugly photograph of her holding up a mask representing Trump’s severed head? And, most of all, what about James Hodgkinson, who shot at a group of GOP political officials and nearly killed Representative Steve Scalise? These are all said with triumph, as if the transformation of the GOP into a violent mob is rendered moot by these examples.

I disapproved of laughing off the attack on Rand Paul and the Griffin photo shoot. (I am allergic to even the implication of violence against any president.) But I also don’t think these are neatly comparable cases; Paul, a middle-aged man, was attacked by a neighbor angry over a pile of brush in Paul’s yard, and Griffin paid a significant career price for her tasteless stunt.

Hodgkinson and DePape, by contrast, do seem alike, a similarity exploited by Republicans. Both were troubled and unstable men who spent a lot of time on the internet and settled on political figures as their intended target. That’s fair as far as it goes.

The problem is that the GOP and their media footmen are flooding the zone with hate, and creating more potential DePapes every day. There is no equivalence here; it’s not liberals who are threatening election officials, stalking ballot boxes with guns, or barraging Congress’s phones and inboxes daily with threats. January 6 should have been our warning that these messages have real power, and yet that terrible day has already receded from our collective memory.

To see how the right wing is deranging more people every day, consider the case of Scott Haven, a Utah insurance salesman. In a new book, the journalist Robert Draper notes that Haven was convicted in 2019 of making threats in many of the almost 4,000 calls he made over two years to Democrats in Congress, singling out Maxine Waters, Dick Durbin, and Jerry Nadler:

He focused his attention on them because Limbaugh and Hannity had themselves done so—even going so far as to supply their Washington office numbers while on the air. Haven dutifully jotted them down. Then he began calling, sharing sentiments like the following:

“Tell the son of a bitch we are coming to hang the ******!”

Later, as he pleaded guilty in court, Haven trembled with regret. So did many of the insurrectionists of January 6. Perhaps David DePape will do so as well one day. But the members and staff on the Hill who lived in fear of Haven’s threats will not get those years back; the people killed and injured in the Capitol breach cannot be made whole; Paul Pelosi’s body is no less shattered.

Sadistic glee in harming others is a sin (at least in my faith). But it is also a social cancer, a rot that can spread quickly and kill the spirit of democracy. If all attempts at reason and all offers of friendship fail, the rest of us should shun those whose dark hearts encourage them to revel in such poison. Unfortunately, millions of our fellow citizens seem poised to vote many such people into power. The darkness is spreading.

Lash wrote:

The longer a ‘representative’ is in Washington, the more deals they make with lobbyists and other people peddling money for favors. They’re all multimillionaires because they decided to enrich themselves by selling out their constituents.

TERM LIMITS.

You’re being shifty as usual. You were disparaging the old politicians for being “doddering” (read: incompetent). When met with cogent arguments showing how their age generally reflects their aging constituency and should not in and of itself be a stopper, you shift to focusing on how longer times in Washington mean more corruption.

Those are two different things. A congressman/senator/governor can be corrupt as **** and just be in their 40s or 50 ( Desantis, Cruz, Rubio, etc)

If you want to argue that we shouldn’t trust people over age 65 in government, just do it. Don’t start tap dancing when it starts being obvious how stupid the argument is.

I’ll be glad to see the truth—whatever it is.
Won’t you?

The officer in D.C. quickly pulled up additional camera angles from around Pelosi’s home and began to backtrack, watching recordings from the minutes before San Francisco police arrived. There, on camera, was a man with a hammer, breaking a glass panel and entering the speaker’s home, according to three people familiar with how Capitol Police learned of the break-in and who have been briefed on or viewed the video themselves.

@neptuneblue,
It’s stupid that these corrupt old bags of bones are still doddering around Washington, stealing openly from the American people.

Only Sanders? Not Pelosi and Feinstein and the others? You’re so intellectually dishonest.

ALL OF THEM.

Quote:

@Lash,
Quote:
TERM LIMITS.

Let people vote for whomever they wish as long as they want. Instead, concentrate on campaign finance reform, banning revolving door lobbyists, overturning "Citizens United", repealing corporate personhood, and pursuing other structural reforms to the actual system rather than regulating the duration of personalities in office.

Lash wrote:

Only Sanders? Not Pelosi and Feinstein and the others? You’re so intellectually dishonest.

ALL OF THEM.

It makes sense that he’d single out Sanders. A couple years ago, you not only couldn’t shut up about what a visionary leader he was and what a great president he’d be, but also how cute he was and how attractive you found him. At the time, he’d been in Washington as a congressman and Senator for over twenty years, and he was over 75 years old.

It makes sense that he’d single out Sanders.